Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower | 
pickIn this deeply intelligent, thoughtful book, Dr Cooper explores race and gender and many of the realities of living as a black woman. There are things here and there I would dispute (not the living as a black woman but, as I am white), but that disagreement doesn‘t make this book any less superb. #SheSaid
pickI read this one for the #SheSaid challenge. I'm still trying to process it and decide how I'd rate it, but what I know is it pushed me and created discomfort, so that is success. I'm glad I read it, and I'll be thinking about it for awhile. @Riveted_Reader_Melissa
pick#Read2025 #MonthlyNonFiction2025 #RealHistory #HonestHistory
Read with #SheSaid for April, Brittney Copper writes clearly & passionately & I like how she weaves her personal experiences in with culture, history & current events. It‘s dismaying that this book was written in 2018 with Trump in office the first time & reading it in 2025 things just continue to get worse. Truthfully as a white woman, it was uncomfortable reading at times as she ⬇️
Hello #SheSaid!
This month & this book flew by for me!
How did you all feel about this last section, and the book as a whole?
pickThis author is very thoughtful and her perspective is interesting. I mostly listened to this on audio but I had a print copy as well.
#SheSaid @Riveted_Reader_Melissa
#BookSpinBingo @TheAromaofBooks
pickI loved how Cooper mixed the personal, statistics/ facts and using famous people to highlight her points. She uses Beyoncé, Bill and Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama. The analysis of one of Beyoncé‘s songs was eye opening and the analysis of Michelle Obama‘s hair on Trump‘s inauguration just the same.
She also looks at how it is to be the only Black in the room, being raised by a single mother and the importance of sisterhood
#SheSaid
Hello #SheSaid.
Sorry for the day late post…I hope you had a good Easter if you celebrate.
Join us in the comments as you finish this section
The video for “Formation” pays homage to post-Katarina New Orleans and ends with Bey using the weight of her body to sink a New Orleans police cruiser into the flood‘s waters. Putting middle fingers up to the state that incarcerates the most people per capita anywhere on the globe, and including an image of a Black boy dancing for his life while staring down a line of a police in riot gear, is a bold fuck-you to the forces that seek to snuff out
pickI really liked the way Cooper mixes the political and personal in this book. As a white woman, she made me rethink some encounters I had in my 20s; that was interesting. I loved her section about theology for grown women. Cooper also does an excellent job narrating the audiobook; I may go back and read it in print. #SheSaid #audiowalk
Hello #SheSaid!
Some good essays this week, I could not help thinking about some of the current US political/religious melding that is happening currently. See you all in the comments as you finish this section!
I‘m finally caught up on this for #SheSaid. I particularly liked the section on theology for grown women. The temperatures were great today, with a wonderful breeze. I‘m going to hate it when it starts getting hot and muggy again. #audiowalk
Intersectionality, or the idea that we are all integrally formed and multiply impacted by the different ways that systems of white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy affects our lives, was a mostly foreign notion to these young scientists. Intersectional education happens primarily in the kinds of college classrooms that cause conservative politicians to lose their shit on the regular. Intersectionality is considered fluffy, liberal, radical,
Temperatures are back up, but the breeze made my #audiowalk a lovely one. I like that Brittney Cooper is the narrator for her own book; she does a great job. #SheSaid
It has been nearly thirty-eight years since a grown man, drunk on his own sense of entitlement, attempted to murder my mother. According to several years of reports by the Violence Police Center, in this, the second decade of the twenty-first century, eight Black women per week, more than one per day, are murdered, usually with guns, and usually by a Black male they know. More than one thousand women of all races are murdered each year, in similar
Hello #SheSaid I hope you had a good week and maybe some Spring/Fall weather where you are at.
What did you think of the first few essays?
“It just seems like Black women are trying to force white women to accept and include them. I‘m still not over how those suffragists treated Ida B. Wells at that march in 1913.” She was right. A group of white suffragists had tried to force Wells to march in back during a 1913 suffrage march. Wells patently refused, though, and found a way to march with her state delegation
#SheSaid
Beyoncé gets that lesson about feminism better than most. And she has been one of the biggest victims of this failure to love women among Black feminists. Until the release of her magnum opus, Lemonade, an album so self- consciously about the interior lives, struggles, and emotions of Black women that even most of Bey‘s haters had to bow down
…
Beyoncé is my feminist muse
Next up for #SheSaid!
April 6: The Problems With Sass ~ Strong Female Leads
April 13: The Smartest ManI Never Knew ~ Grown-Woman Theology
April 20: Orchestrated Fury ~ White-Girl Tears
April 27: Never Scared ~ Closing
Please put in your library holds & interlibrary loans! And see you all this weekend!
#BlackHistoryMonth recommendations
Day 5
Nonfiction
Black women in the US are often characterized as angry. It is a harmful and well used tactic for racists to demonize and dismiss Black women's troubles and strides.
Cooper takes a look at the history and the way this characterization has affected today powerful Black women like Beyonce and Serena Williams, as well as the effect on herself.
A powerful and engrossing read.
pickAn amazing pick during black history month and (almost) to kick off women‘s history month. This memoir was incredibly eye opening, raw, and well written. An insight into intersectional feminism, and how to be a better, more badass woman.
pickFantastic! Powerful, angry, smart.
#currentlisten #BFC21 Long walk tonight to celebrate 56 pounds lost. Such an amazing turnaround-now I enjoy movement and my day doesn‘t feel right without it! @wanderinglynn
pickThis was the feminist essay collection I didn‘t know I needed. Brittney writes casually but not humorously about her way to feminism as a Black woman. I found her stories to be interesting and her points to be thoughtful. She touched on being a fat feminist, and I would‘ve loved to read more about that. Perhaps in her next book. #audiobook #NationalReadABookDay
pickA powerful book that everyone should read. It really is “a book by a grown-ass woman written for other grown-ass women.”
Reckon it's time to read this one.
Lol, I‘m sorry cause this isn‘t even close to being the best part of the book but as a gay male I laughed and wondered if I should have married a woman by this logic. Lolol- but conversely it also made me think of this song by Jill Scott. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vZq35f2KUjk A song by a Black woman telling her man all the things she can do and be but still saying, “I need you.” It‘s lovely.
pickEloquent indeed. I‘m always impressed with people who do such a great job of using the exact words needed to convey ideas. She did a great job. I thought she had some real thought provoking chapters in here about fear and where that leads to, about white girl tears, but the one that really rang bells for me was the filtering down of Bible teachings by the Black community into respectability politics and what that does. THAT was fire. Pick!
pickYesssss, I needed this today! Straightforward, hilarious and, well, eloquent!
“May your rage be a force for good.
What you build is indefinitely more important than what you tear down.”
pick⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
A moving essay collection covering an array of cultural, personal, and political topics. Another important read about black womanhood and feminism, that‘s both real and relatable.
“May you have joy. May you ask more and better questions. May your rage be a force for good.”
Today‘s #Recommendsday is one to read after you‘ve read some of the other recommendations. If you‘ve read a few and find yourself good and mad, pick this one up and be good and mad in good company, and then find ways to use that rage as fuel for change.
#BLM
#BLMReadingList
“Joy arises from an internal clarity about our purpose. My purpose is justice. And the fight for justice brings me joy.”
pick“Power and Empowerment aren‘t the same thing.” “Eloquent rage isn‘t always loud but it is always effective.” This book was so powerful, I loved it. I listened to this book as an audio book I really need to to buy it. So many gems. Thank you Brittney Cooper for writing this book.
pickI loved it. I already know I‘ll need a reread.
Avid Reader Press also provided a list of black-owned bookstores for me to support as well!
#SupportBlackVoices
so-so⭐️⭐️ This collection made me rightfully uncomfortable. Dr. Cooper‘s thoughts/opinions are absolutely valid, though often repetitive. Perhaps some bear repeating? idk. Felt like filler. The essays about her upbringing were fantastic. Learning about other folks‘ experiences IS paramount. That said, the chapter on “white women‘s tears” ruined the book for me. As she undoubtedly knows, blanket statements are harmful.
This short video posted on Twitter today is a great introduction to the badassery of Brittney Cooper and makes me want to reread Eloquent Rage right now. ❤️ #blackhistorymonth - https://twitter.com/newshour/status/1098643517918695424?s=21
Stopped at Powell‘s City of Books in Portland today. Happy Valentine‘s weekend to me!
pickLast book I read in the decade, and it was a great one! Here's to more reading in 2020! Happy New Year! #happynewyear
I finished four books this week. Two audiobooks and two ebooks. The three books on the right are my current reads. Two I started today and one, Mommie Dearest, I‘ve been reading FOREVER. Joan Crawford was a grade A bitch. #bookreport
pickThis book feels like you‘re just having a conversation w/the author, which is a great writing style for this type of memoir. It‘s accessible & engaging while also at times heavy & insightful. I appreciate Cooper‘s layered look at so many issues that Black women confront, & her straightforward taking to task of groups, including white women, who often do Black women harm, intentionally or not. A bit repetitive at times, but overall terrific. 4/5 ⭐️
All voters should have access to candidates that make them feel recognized, but there‘s a problem when your notion of recognition is predicated on someone else‘s exclusion. There‘s a problem when visibility becomes a zero-sum game, where making one group‘s demands visible renders every other group‘s political concerns obscure. Only white supremacy demands such exacting and fatalistic math.
Black feminism has been a liberatory theology for me in its own right. It has made space for me to bring my spiritual self into the academy and my academic, intellectual self into the spiritual parts of my life.
